"After Cybersyn"

I wrote a short piece of games-focused alternate history for Memory Insufficient's most recent issue (Volume 2, Issue 6, for the sake of time-traveling historians of the future).

It's about Chilean Cybernetics (Cybersyn), avant-garde latin american fiction, and what computer games might be like if they had been born from somewhere besides the American military-industrial complex. More of it is based on fact than you might imagine, though I regret to inform you that Robert Kennedy was not elected in 1968.
Download the issue for free. It also includes some games history madlibs written by guest-editor Rachel Simone Weil.

Cascadia, Bioregionalism, and Sense of Place in Game Design (Lost Levels 2014)

Lost Levels is one of my very favorite yearly events, if an event can be called so in its second year of existence. Held in Yerba Buena Gardens on the thursday of the weeklong Game Developers Conference, it is a free and radically inclusive unconference/picnic. Crowds gather under arcadian boughs to hear speakers hold forth on deep or amusing topics, or to take part in discussions about what game studies is, or to engage in non-competitive dance-offs. It feeds the soul and reminds us of the communicative testament of not using powerpoint.

Naturally, I have gotten swept up in the proceedings, and given talks the last two years about topics which I care about but the average indie game developer/critic/weirdo might not be aware of. Last year I ranted for five minutes on “Postmodern Sports,” explaining the alienation of the college athlete and comparing Alabama football to a nineteenth-century army. This year, I talked about Cascadia, bioregionalism, and fostering a greater sense of place in game design.

Games writer Marshall Sandoval was in attendance, and recently mused on the topic of "Regional Authenticity" in this PopMatters post, so I figured it was time to write up my talk. This is faintly updated based on some more recent information, but it carries over the gist of what I meant to say.

On Skeletor Affirmations and Supervillain Psychology

If you and I are 'friends' on facebook, you may have seen me sharing images from "Skeletor is Love," now active for roughly one year. It's been buzzfed, and blogged, and anthologized, and fed through, and yet I still find it worth following.

In part, it is because the figure of Skeletor provides an ironic, tongue-in-cheek vehicle for straightforwardly earnest and possibly corny statements. I can feel safe that my social-media-hologram will not be negatively affected by sharing it, because the text is adjoining Skeletor, rather than a picture of a skinny white woman doing yoga on a beach. Of course, I also appreciate being gently uplifting, knowing that for all our snark, of the dozens of people who might see my post, one of them might really need it. It's a challenge to be positive and helpful without resorting to smarm. (This is one of the reasons that for all my wariness of TED-talk-types, I refrain from throwing Jane McGonigal under the bus.)

That's all well and good, but why Skeletor? Why not He-Man (or She-Ra) affirmations? I think this has something to do with the figure of the villain in an episodic cartoon format, and how that relates to positive thinking.

LOVEINT, a piece of surveillance poetry

I dreamt 

last 

night

that I was being 

tracked

followed monitored judged desired by

the best surveillance man in the business

that he could tell I wanted him

even when I looked a picture of normality

that his dark gaze could pierce me

whenever he turn't it toward me

and never often enough.

I dreamt

that everything I did had an audience

that the secret significance of my actions

had someone to appreciate them.

I dreamt 

of chemtrails and HAARP arrays

and distant lovers,

desirous of my scent like the old stasi 

watching me

waiting

aching for an excuse to render me 

extraordinarily

I woke.